Veronica Buckley captures 'The Secret Wife of Louis XIV' in her biography of an unassuming mistress

If one mark of a successful biographer is the ability to make an uninteresting figure interesting, on that alone Veronica Buckley's "The Secret Wife of Louis XIV" deserves recommendation.

Francoise D'Aubigne, the mistress of France's King Louis XIV, never seemed one of history's more appealing figures.

The very idea of a royal mistress, officially recognized and more or less salaried -- and this one dowdy, pious and thoroughly domestic -- might appear an unpromising subject for today's reader.

However, Buckley -- who was born and educated in New Zealand, did postgraduate work at Oxford, wrote her first biography on Queen Christina of Sweden, and now lives in Vienna, Austria -- has brought into perspective a life story that's thoroughly French.

Born in 1635 of impoverished minor nobility, Francoise blossomed into a beautiful, intelligent adolescent with few options. She might have entered a convent or become a kept woman.

Instead, at 16, she married Paul Scarron, a celebrated satiric poet in his 40s who was crippled by rheumatism. She nursed Scarron through his final years and presided over his Paris salon, an institution Buckley says was at that time "one of Europe's glories, a sparkling mix of minds and manners, elegant, provocative, sensual, intellectual, and, above all, great fun. . . . In an age of rigid class distinctions, the salon was a free-flowing social river, its only elite the brilliant and the beautiful."

Modest, obliging, a good listener, Francoise gained respect and important connections. Although Scarron's death left her little money, she achieved her independence. "The name of widow is the name of liberty," wrote one contemporary.

Francoise didn't meet the king until 1671, when she was 36, and she became his mistress in 1674. Shortly after the death of Louis' queen in 1683, they secretly married.

Buckley depicts Louis' court as something of a looking-glass version of the salon, and of ordinary life. The Sun King's realm has been famously written about, and Buckley makes judicious use of Madame de Sevigne and Saint-Simon, among others.

"That country" is what courtiers called the court -- a place with its own customs and laws, to which even the king must bow. Buckley renders it vividly, often comically, more often tragically. Dozens of indelible portraits walk these pages, one of the most comic and sad being Louis himself:

"Unable to analyze, he criticized instinctively; unable to brook restraint, he thrust aside whatever stood in his way."

It's long been a mystery how so vain and glorious a king was won over, so thoroughly, by an unassuming, aging, not especially glamorous woman. Buckley makes it all plain -- and all too human.